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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

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it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

right on the money.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

I think it's pretty crazy how slow a lot of the newer things in Windows 11 are. Explorer is super slow, Settings are slow. Sometimes I think even if I wanted to make things that slow (without using sleep statements), I wouldn't know how do it.

Make opening a settings page require multiple queries to Microsoft servers. That way you get lag with a bonus of variability and in the case of broken wifi, extreme lag as it waits for the connections to time out.

I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.

If it was happening, they could at least spy us asynchronously.

You can certainly test the theory pretty easily with Wireshark

I was lazy that day. But today! I just used procmon, filtered to include "systemsettings.exe", turned off all the other guff and just saw network packet meta data (no content).

And yes, as you browse around system settings there are TCP connections to MS servers. I don't know that they are "blocking" though and have run out of care factor.

You see it in Windows 10, as well. Seeing the "working on it" when navigating folders, as if I'm using 5400 RPM hard disk drives.

To be fair, NTFS is just slow and awful and we’ve all known about it for a while.

I’m sure the new UI piled on top doesn’t help, but as a consolation, the core software is shit too.

using win 7 with 5400 RPM drives... it's still fast...

Windows 11 is insane to me now. Latest update pressing the button to bring up the power options (power off sleep etc) takes like 1-1.5 seconds from button press for the menu options to come up.

I’m just so done with Windows, it is complete garbage now and I don’t use that term loosely, I’ve been using it since Windows 3.1.

Chrome removed ublock origin for me today and I thought to myself why am I even on this OS anymore? What’s keeping me here? Decided to use the outrage over that to just make a clean break from Windows too.

I installed Ubuntu tonight, but this time I’m sticking with it. It already feels so good to have the software behave in a way that makes sense and isn’t some dark pattern meant to harm me and extract value somehow from me.

Ubuntu isn't what it used to be, unfortunately. I'm pretty much in love with Aurora [1] nowadays. It's an immutable distro (for a smartphone-like upgrade experience) based on Fedora and KDE, rock solid, sane defaults, a good selection of dev tools, proper nvidia support if you want it, and it feels really snap!

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

Just curious, what do you think Aurora itself does better than regular fedora kde?

I haven't used plain Fedora much, but Aurora just 'feels' more coherent, polished and stable than other distro's I have used in recent years. I tend to notice bugs/rough edges in all of them, but Aurora somehow just works. Having a strictly fixed core allows it to be fine-tuned better, I guess? Or perhaps it's just in my head. :-)

All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.

Mint and/or Fedora, depending on how new your software needs to be.

Ubuntu pushing snaps like MS was the last straw.

I already split time. I have an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu that I do a lot of types of dev on plus general browsing (I'm actually on it right now). I use Windows for games and gamedev, though as I use Godot for gamedev I could pretty easily do that on Linux as well.

It also pisses me off, but I am not paying for Apple prices on personal devices, and since Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, that there is always something that makes me waste weekends on GNU/Linux, so Windows it is.

You want to escape slow UI and bad corporate rulers... and you chose Ubuntu?!

Dude... Mint, Arch / Manjaro, Void, even Alpine is better. Plenty of good and very lean+mean options out there.

Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. Has been for several years now.

Try looking up what Canonical did and still does with the Snap store.

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

The most frustrating thing with PowerToys is trying to remap keys (like caps lock to Ctrl). It feels like it's done by intercepting the keypress at runtime in the app rather than being configured at the system level, so if you happen to, say, hit your new Ctrl key when the CPU is pegged, it'll revert back to caps lock and then also get stuck. So you have to go into PowerToys to unbind the key, turn off caps lock, then rebind it.

There's another app that does this in the registry I think, but I keep forgetting the name of it.

The registry method is Ctrl2Cap by SysInternals.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctr...

It's the first thing I download whenever I'm setting up a new Windows machine.

I fix this by going into task manager and viciously force quitting any system process that has an enigmatic name or isn't plainly doing something I want to happen. Often it's updating Edge, or it might be indexing temp files for searching with the shitty search function that I don't use. Sometimes it's "Windows Problem Reporting" that's making things glitch and lag. Oh, sometimes there's a whole second copy of Explorer running invisibly, quitting that can help.

Is this always safe to do? I think I broke my PC once by killing some important system tasks

I don't know! It's a reckless thing to do, but satisfying. I tend to stick to killing the same relatively small set of processes, really, and have never noticed any ill effects in about a year. If I was less lazy, I'd research them all - but then I'd want to also research how to stop them running in the first place - and in some cases, like Edge, that threatens to be such a mission that I don't want to embark on it. (I have a script that's supposed to uninstall Edge, but I thought I should read and understand it before I run it, and that was months ago and I never did ... so I still have Edge.)

The answer to that is relatively easy, WinUI 3.0 being shoved into Windows, even though UWP has failed to get adoption, after so many reboots even those of us that were deep into it got pissed off and moved elsewhere, leaving the Windows team as the only group of folks still trying to push it.

Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.

The login screen and start menu both require a key press to start the process (enter pin or start typing search term) and both then drop all subsequent keystrokes for an indefinite period until they’ve finished initialising, displaying, and maybe phoning home and loading ads. It’s infuriating. It turns a simple open-loop “press win key, type search term, enter” into “press win key, wait for visual confirmation, type” which adds both computer latency and your own reaction time to the overall time taken.

To be actually fair, Mac Preferences has worked fine for decades.

Control panel has sucked since windows 2.0

But that's considered normal in the Windows world.

Unfortunately, to stay on top Apple doesn't have to do well for the customer. They only have to do better than wintel/android machines.

Presumably Windows machines with AMD processors, too.

I wouldn't qualify it as fair, both are pretty horrible.

At least the window settings app can be resized like normal apps

Tsk, copying ideas from Apple.

They rewrote many of their tools in SwiftUI.

So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.

And it's still missing certain things Cocoa had well before 2015...

That’s ok because it’s simple enough to escape SwiftUI. Use SwiftUI for the simple bits and UIKit for the harder parts. It’s not a nice solution, but it works

I consider use of UIViewRepresentable to be a kludge, and basically removing the advantages of SwiftUI.

I know that SwiftUI has some native wrappers, like maps, but the way that SwiftUI works, is so radically different from UIKit, that I think mixing them is problematic.

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but...

Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.

They're not .app bundles, they're .appex (extension!) bundles from /System/Library/ExtensionKit/.

Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift.

So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…

SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language. But even that doesn't matter

I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI.

Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

> SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language.

True, imo.

> But even that doesn't matter > Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

I don't think I agree about this entirely. Although you can write unperformant code in any language and framework, SwiftUI is a different world of heavy abstraction. Writing a list view in AppKit using the documentation available allows for and encourages much more deliberate implementation in such a way that it'll be an almost night and day difference compared to the likely NavigationSplitView they're using in Settings. It's an inverse relationship with performance that SwiftUI takes; efficiency of piecing together the high level details first, and little to no control or clarity on how you'd optimize for performance.

My hunch is that with Settings, they're using a NavigationView or NavigationSplitView and not letting each view be recreated on selection, so they're sticking around in memory. However, if they were recreating each pane on selection, it seems like the render of the view waits for some kind of I/O, maybe reading their .plist or interacting directly with a system level CLI, which is why there's a delay before the UI renders.

Another possibility is a combo of both, they're retaining the views in memory AND triggering I/O immediately on selection, so the reads and threads accumulate quickly without being released

Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what?

At least some of them are actually web pages:

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

Hmm, and using React even! No wonder it’s slow and bloated.

You gotta wonder if this has been a reaction to a shrinking Cocoa/ObjC and SwiftUI talent pool

Could be that nowadays a lot of UI code will probably converge on web-first stuff like React, since it has a larger talent pool, as you said, and is inherently cross platform. Microsoft's newer apps like Teams are also built in React.

I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.

I was talking about the settings app in macOS.

Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.

There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens

We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.

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